My hunch, from listening to his music, is that he understood that dissonance and noise aren’t horrible things to be avoided, nor are they ideological ends in themselves to attack the bourgeoisie (an opinion usually held by people who are members of that very same bourgeoisie and think by traumatizing their fellows they are going to make some kind of political breakthrough but usually end up looking pretty bloody stupid), but just another tool in the box of expression.

So I hope the Duke and his descendants will forgive my rather “smeary” moments on this version of one of his greatest melodies. I think they will because the guitar playing of Simon Hopkins is subtle, sophisticated, powerful and operating at a higher level.

It’s a good film. A propaganda movie. But since the propaganda is: “forgive the people you love and fight the Nazis”, it’s easy to swallow.

In it Humphrey Bogart utters the famous line that people’s problems, “…don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world…”

Which seems pertinent (the headline in this newspaper from Iran apparently translates as “World in the hands of crazypeople“, although what’s behind the link may have have changed by the time anyone reads this).

So although it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, it’s still pleasing that this piece of music, (dedicated to the love of my life @AndroidAnnee) has now been played over 100 times on Soundcloud.

I have no doubt that this is down to the masterful and subtle guitar work of my good friend Simon Hopkins rather than anything to do with me.

I did the usual – giving up my date of birth, first line of address, postcode.

Then something odd happened. The recorded voice said that the next time I phoned up they would use my voice to identify me and that I should record my voice now so they could do so.

It didn’t ask my permission to do this, didn’t give me an opt in or an opt out. So I didn’t say anything. Eventually the voice said “we’ll do this next time”.

Oh no we won’t.

It is possible given my failing memory that at some point in the past I signed up to this. However since I’m the kind of person who has not one but two twitter accounts but still refuses to give Twitter his phone number, this seems unlikely. If I did give permission, I take it back now. This blog post means I am unticking the box.

My voice is my data. Trying to “nudge” people into giving up a recording of their voice without explicit permission must surely be a breach of some kind of data protection or privacy policy. At the very least, the “user journey” here is poor. The assumption in the language is that I’m happy to record my voice. I should be asked, explicitly, whether I want to record my voice or not.

The last thing I need is the Government recording my voice, the recording then being hacked, and used by a criminal to impersonate me.

Here’s a recording of a short fragment of the message:

Every time an automated till in my supermarket flashes red for no reason, I mutter to myself that these machines should be our servants, not our masters.